I Hid Swag and I'd Do It Again! - Recapping our DotDev Adventure
Liquid Weekly Podcast: Shopify Developers Talking Shopify DevelopmentShow Notes
Episode 073 – I Hid Swag and I'd Do It Again! - Recapping our DotDev Adventure
Karl and Taylor reunite for a full-week recap of Shopify Dev in Toronto — from a canceled Air Canada flight and a border crossing full of event signage, to Taylor's metaobjects talk, the live podcast recording at Dev Studio, and the Shopify-shutting-down-an-entire-street Block Party. They also debrief BrightWork, the first-ever event Taylor hosted after Tectonic was canceled, and close with a run of street-style interviews from the Dev floor covering POS development, agent search and LLM indexing, customer accounts, Sidekick extensions, and — of course — the snacks.
---
Sponsor
Promo Party Pro — a free gift with purchase app Karl helped build with the team at EtherCycle. Out of the box it gives you campaigns built to increase AOV and conversion: set a spend threshold, show shoppers how close they are to earning a gift, and let Promo Party Pro handle the rest. Discount Functions under the hood, one app embed (no theme surgery), and campaigns auto-pause when the gift sells out.
Agency offer: get one of your clients a full year free. Promo Party Pro - https://promoparty.app/agency
Find it in the Shopify App Store today.
---
Subscribe to Liquid Weekly
Don't miss out on expert insights and tips—subscribe to Liquid Weekly for more content like this: https://liquidweekly.com/
---
Timestamps
- 00:00 – Cold open: two dudes, a minivan, a border - 00:31 – Welcome back, Taylor returns from episode 72 - 01:31 – Taylor's full Dev swag outfit on display - 05:28 – The retro Pizza Hut detour - 08:09 – Taylor's drive up and the Trudy's-apartment-as-storage-unit problem - 11:02 – Karl's canceled Air Canada flight and the two-ticket trap - 14:19 – Meeting Toby on the plane and taking the train to Union Station - 16:28 – Sponsor: Promo Party Pro - 17:10 – Airbnb vs. hotel, and Toronto neighborhoods for next year - 20:07 – Monday events: agency brunch, Good API tree planting, live podcast, pickleball - 24:43 – Being grateful for the community and welcoming first-timers - 26:03 – Day one: rain, badge lines, and a pushed-back keynote - 27:22 – The Dev snack review series explained - 30:32 – Build Award dinner, the Shopi mascot, and a Rubik's Cube - 32:08 – Taylor meets Adam Wathan (and immediately regrets it) - 34:42 – Day two: Taylor's metaobjects talk and the Dev Studio live recording - 36:33 – The Block Party: Shopify shuts down a Toronto street - 41:21 – BrightWork debrief: what worked, what to fix next time - 44:00 – Frat party, yacht party, and the flotilla rules - 46:44 – Street interviews from the Dev floor begin
---
Resources
- Promo Party Pro – Free gift with purchase app built on Discount Functions; this episode's sponsor. https://promoparty.app - Ether Cycle - https://ethercycle.com – Karl's partners on Promo Party Pro. - The Support Heroes - https://thesupportheroes.com – 24/7/365 specialized customer support for Shopify apps; Angie's team, and co-hosts of the live podcast panel with Martin. - Good API - https://www.thegoodapi.com/shopify/ – Sustainability app for planting trees, removing ocean plastic, and donating to over a million US charities; Amy's team. - Raise Wave – Fundraiser app Good API built together with Felix & Norton - https://apps.shopify.com/raisewave - POS Cafe – Shopify point of sale app built by Adam Wooding out of South East Queensland, Australia - https://apps.shopify.com/poscafe - Three Acres – Brendan Quigley's agency. https://threeacres.ca/ - Helium / Helium Customer Fields - https://heliumdev.com – Customer accounts and B2B registration/approval apps; Brett and Josiah's team. - Locksmith - https://uselocksmith.com – Longtime Helium app partner. - Kirill Platonov's Rails on Shopify template - https://kirillplatonov.com – Bootstrap template for building Shopify apps on Ruby on Rails. - Tailwind CSS - https://tailwindcss.com – Adam Wathan was at Dev; Shopify is looking at incorporating Tailwind into Liquid.
More from Liquid Weekly Podcast: Shopify Developers Talking Shopify Development
Taylor is in India for Shop Quest, so Karl flies solo with Charles Swayne, owner and app developer at JadePuma Apps and the person behind Datify. Charles is 21, learned Python in sixth grade, and now runs a multi-agent development workflow that researches, plans, audits the plan, executes, and tests itself before he ever looks at the code.
Georgi Petrov, CEO and co-founder of Uxify, joins Karl and Taylor to talk about the half of web performance nobody optimizes for: the shopper's device. After building SMS Bump (acquired by Yotpo), ConsentMo, and NitroPack (acquired by WP Engine), Georgi is now tackling device-specific friction, the laggy buttons, layout shifts, and interaction delays that vary wildly from one phone to the next. We get into how Uxify profiles a visitor's capability without touching your code, the specialized agents that fix problems on the fly, the ClickHouse-powered data layer behind it all, and how to think about performance heading into BFCM. Plus the Dev Changelog and Picks of the Week. Sponsor The Support Heroes: https://www.thesupportheroes.com/ Subscribe to Liquid Weekly Don't miss out on expert insights and tips. Subscribe to Liquid Weekly for more content like this: https://liquidweekly.com/ Find Georgi Online Uxify: https://uxify.com/integrations/shopify/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgipetrov/ Timestamps (00:00) Open (00:29) Intros (02:11) Meet Georgi Petrov of Uxify (02:54) Origin story: hardware hacking to his first software (06:03) Finding Shopify: SMS Bump, ConsentMo, and NitroPack (12:23) Making fast decisions and failing cheaply (15:32) Why Uxify: performance is half website, half device (20:11) How it works: profiling devices and adapting on the fly (26:17) Sitting alongside your theme without touching your code (28:26) Real user monitoring and specialized agents (37:47) The tech stack: ClickHouse and heavy browser testing (41:57) Shopify cart variations and a clever checkout fallback (46:24) Prepping for BFCM and who Uxify is for (51:14) Dev Changelog (58:22) Picks of the Week Dev Changelog [action required] Variants now support multiple barcodes: https://shopify.dev/changelog/product-variant-barcode-is-being-replaced-by-barcodes Create and delete dev stores in Shopify CLI: https://shopify.dev/changelog/create-and-delete-dev-stores-in-shopify-cli [action required] Discounts Allocator Function API developer preview has ended: https://shopify.dev/changelog/discounts-allocator-function-api-developer-preview-has-ended Delivery options in Shopify Functions input now expose their metafields: https://shopify.dev/changelog/delivery-options-in-shopify-functions-input-now-expose-their-metafields Prepare your app for the Shopify admin's new look: https://shopify.dev/changelog/prepare-your-app-for-the-shopify-admins-new-look [action required] Updates to Events payloads and subscription configuration: https://shopify.dev/changelog/updates-to-events-payloads-and-subscription-configuration New Pricing audit trail for contextual product variant prices: https://shopify.dev/changelog/pricing-audit-trail-for-contextual-product-variant-prices [breaking api change] [action required] Removed session.currentSession.staffMemberId from POS UI Extensions (2026-10): https://shopify.dev/changelog/removed-session-currentsession-staffmemberid-from-pos-ui-extensions-2026-10 Request a bundle size exception for existing UI extensions: https://shopify.dev/changelog/request-a-bundle-size-exception-for-existing-ui-extensions Picks of the Week Karl: Keto Oreo-style sandwich cookies (about 50 calories each), part of his ongoing tour through packaged keto snacks: https://www.choczero.com/products/keto-sandwich-cookies Georgi: Calisthenics between AI prompts. Knocking out push-ups and squats while waiting on an agent, which he says burns the time well and sharpens his focus when he comes back. Taylor: Ted Lasso, season 4 on Apple TV+. Still, in his words, one of the most wholesome shows around: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10986410/
Prakhar Shrivastava of FoxSell joins Karl and Taylor to talk about Shop Quest, the Shopify community event he and his team run in Bengaluru, and to prep Taylor for his first trip to India.
In this episode of the Liquid Weekly Podcast, hosts Karl Meisterheim and Taylor Page are joined by Alexander Hupfer, founder of Fusion Metrics and a solo Shopify app developer.
Recorded live at Shopify's DotDev, this special is two sessions in one. First, Ben Sehl walks Karl and Taylor through the future of Liquid: why the language is being reshaped for the agentic era, the new Partials tag that replaces the section rendering API, arrays and Booleans finally landing, agents.md and design.md guidance, and the Tailwind partnership.